Sister Jane announces Presidential Faculty Award recipients

President Jane Gerety, RSM, has announced the latest recipients of Presidential Faculty Awards: Dr. Jon Marcoux, assistant professor in the Noreen Stonor Drexel Cultural and Historic Preservation Program, and Dr. Jen McClanaghan, assistant professor and writer in residence in the Department of English and Communications.

Marcoux will receive a one-course reduction during the fall 2016 semester to complete an article based on his archaeological research project, “Documenting the Southeastern Indian Diaspora (ca. 1670-1715).”

“This period saw many groups leaving their ancestral territories and moving hundreds of miles in order flee slaving raids and/or disease outbreaks or to move closer to European trading posts,” Marcoux said. “This project offers the unique opportunity to document the emerging social relationships that came to define the Colonial experience for American Indians – a group whose voice is keenly absent in current histories.”

Marcoux’s project will also provide opportunities for hands-on learning and collaboration to students in the cultural and historic preservation program. “By working closely with students in order to enrich our understanding of an historically exploited group, the project contributes to the University mission of imparting and expanding knowledge, developing skills and cultivating enduring values,” he said.

McClanaghan will receive a one-course reduction during the spring 2017 semester to work on a chapbook of poems about Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy, and research new innovations for her writing courses.

“I am drawn to origin stories, to the ways people, and especially women, recreate themselves and, in McAuley’s case, the world around them,” McClanaghan said. “I am also drawn to the friction between the role models we choose and those who choose us, between those who struggle to give shape to their own lives and those who, like McAuley, have reshaped the lives of many hundreds and thousands of souls who followed in her steps.”

McClanaghan said the chapbook will honor the University’s mercy tradition and “reflect on the terms I set for my life as a woman and writer and academic.”